So now we've discussed two levels of
language, the linguistic level and the
speech act level.
In this lecture, we want to look at the
third level of language, normally the
level of conversational acts.
And the basic idea is really simple.
We use language to bring about a change in
the world.
For example, I might turn to a friend and
say, Could you loan me your car?
Well, what am I doing?
I'm performing a speech act of requesting,
or asking a favor, something like that.
But am I doing it just for its own sake?
Did I ask a favor just in order to be
asking a favor, like it was fun to ask a
favor?
No.
I was asking a favor to bring about a
certain effect.
I wanted him to hand over the keys to his
car so I could use it.
And I wanted him to give me permission to
use his car, so I could do it legally.
So I'm trying to bring about a change, not
only in the physical location of the keys,
but also in the legal rights that I have
with regard to his car.
So I'm trying to bring about a change in
the world, simply by uttering those words,
could you please loan me your car?
It happens all the time.
Here's another example, suppose my friend
is wondering whether the moon is full, and
I say, the moon is full.
Well, am I uttering those words just to
expel hot air?
No.
Am I uttering those words just to express
my own belief?
No.
I'm trying to inform my friend.
I'm trying to bring about a change in my
friend's beliefs.
And that's to bring about an effect in the
world.
So that's a conversational act, to bring
about the effect in the world of informing
my friend.
Informing is a conversational act.
And almost all speech acts have,
particular effects that are associated
with them.
When you ask a question, you're trying to
bring about someone answering the
question.
When you apologize, you're trying to bring
about forgiveness.
When you promise somebody, you try to
bring about the person relying on your
promise in order to believe that you're
going to do it.
So speech acts are often associated with
particular effects that the speaker
intends to bring about.
And the bringing about of that effect is
the conversational act.
So, if we want an official definition of a
conversational act, we can say that the
conversational act is the bringing about
of the intended effect, which is the
standard effect for the kind of speech act
that the speaker is performing.
That's what a conversational act is.
Now, since the conversational act is the
bringing about of the standard effect.
The conversational act does not occur when
that effect does not occur.
And that might seem weird that what kind
of act you perform depends on whether the
effect occurs.
maybe several seconds, maybe even longer,
in the future.
But it's not that weird when you think
about it.
Because if you pull the trigger of a gun
that's pointed at someone,
Then whether your act of pulling the
trigger is an act of killing depends on
whether the person dies.
And yet the person's death is something
independent of it.
It's an effect that occurs maybe quite a
while in the future.
But your act wasn't an act of killing
unless the person died.
And that's the story of conversational
acts.
Your act is not this conversational act
unless the effect occurs.
It has to be the intended effect, that's
the standard effect, for the kind of
speech act that you're performing.
So.
The really tricky question is, How are we
going to bring about these effects?
Because it's not so easy.
Think about how other people bring about
effects.
Think about a baker baking the cake.
Well, the baker needs to.
Get together the right ingredients, and
bring them to the right place, and get the
right amount of ingredients.
You know, if a baker fills the entire
kitchen with flour he's not going to have any
room left over to bake the cake.
And has to bring the right ingredients,
that means if instead of bringing flour he
brings gravel, he can't bake a cake.
And he has to put together those
ingredients, in the right way,
in the right order, for example.
You can't mix them in the wrong order,
The cake won't work out.
It has to bake it for the right amount of
time, and so on, and so on.
So there are a lot of tricky rules about
how to bring about the effect of a good
cake.
Well, the same thing applies to
conversational acts.
There are going to be rules that have to be
followed in order to bring about the
conversational act that you're trying to
bring about.
That is, in order to have that intended
effect of the speech act in the
circumstances.
And the same kind of rules apply to any
rational person trying to pursue any goal.
Whenever you want to bring about an
effect, you have to follow certain general
rules.
And so.
It applies to people who are trying to
bring about effects.
By language.
That is, to people who are trying to
perform conversational acts.
If you want to inform someone, that is, to
have an effect on their beliefs, then you
need to speak in a certain way.
And if you want to promise someone, that
is, to get them to rely on you, that's the
conversational act associated
with the speech act of promising.
But you're not going to get them to rely
on you unless you follow certain rules.
And so what we need to try to understand
are the rules of language that enable us to
bring about these effects that are the
conversational acts.
Now on this question, Paul Grice helps us
out a lot.
He's one of the great philosophers of the
twentieth century.
And he laid out a series of rules
governing conversational acts.
He called them the conversational maxims.
And we're going to look at them one by
one.
Grice focuses in on context where people
are stating things and where they are
cooperating with each other and trying to
inform each other.
He's not trying to provide a general
theory, so it's for statements in a
cooperative context.
So the first maxim is the rule of quantity
and it basically says,
Don't say more than is required for the
purpose that you're trying to achieve.
If you say too many words, the point gets
lost in the words, so you shouldn't say
more than you need for the purpose at
hand.
Second part of the rule of quantity is you
shouldn't say too little.
Right?
Because if you say too little then that's
going to be misleading and it's not going
to fulfill your purpose because the person
that you're talking to won't have all the
information that they need.
Second rule is the rule of quality.
The rule of quality says, Don't say what
you don't believe to be true.
Don't lie, don't mislead, don't deceive.
Right?
But also, this is second part of the
quality.
Don't say something that you lack adequate
justification for.
Because you shouldn't just be talking off
the top of your head with no reason to
believe what you're saying.
These are all pretty common sense rules,
but they weren't apparent to people until
Grice formulated them.
The third rule is a rule of relevance, and
it's the toughest of all.
Rule of relevance says, Be relevant.
Look, it's short.
I'll grant you that.
It's going to be easy to remember, I'll grant
you that.
But it really is kind of tricky to apply
the rule because you have to remember
what's relevant.
And we'll see some problems with that, but
for now just remember that it should be
obvious.
When you're talking about a subject and
you want to achieve a certain purpose and
the person you're talking to is
cooperating with you and Grice is
assuming,
then you ought to be talking about things
that are relevant.
And if you change the subject that's going
to be very misleading.
And the fourth conversational maxim is the
rule of manner.
It says Be brief, be orderly, avoid
obscurity, and avoid ambiguity.
Pretty simple, it's all about style
because if you're not brief enough people
won't pay attention to you.
If it's not orderly people will get
confused by that.
And if you're ambiguous or obscure then
people won't understand what you're
saying.
So these four rules are followed by
speakers when they're cooperating with
each other.
When people aren't cooperating, they're
trying to trick or deceive each other,
they might violate these rules and mislead
people by abusing these rules.
But when they are cooperating, these are
the rules they follow, and that makes them
able to deceive people by violating them.
And also notice that these rules might not
be completely clear to you.
You might not have ever thought of them
before.
But now that we mention them, they
probably seem pretty obvious.
It's kind of like the finger and singer
rule that we saw before regarding
pronunciation.
That's a rule that you hadn't thought of
before.
But once it's pointed out, it seems kind
of obvious.
Well that's what Grice has done.
That he's shown us the rules governing
conversational acts that enable us to
bring about certain effects by language.
Now we can use these rules to understand
what's going on in a lot of conversations.
Imagine you're in a restaurant, and the
waiter walks up to your table and says,
Well, for dessert, you can have cake or
ice cream.
Well, what has that waiter suggested?
He suggested that that's all you could
have.
Cake, ice cream.
Well he didn't mention pie,
so you can't have pie.
Footnotes, if he's a good waiter, and he
knows that they have pie back there, and
you could order it,
then he ought to be telling you about the
pie.
He would be violating the rule of
quantity,
That is not providing you all the relevant
information if he said, You can have cake
or ice cream.
And you could also have pie, but he didn't
mention pie.
So because you assume that he's
cooperating with you, and trying to get
you what you want to eat, since he is your
waiter, after all,
there must not be pie available, so you
say, I'll take ice cream, even though you
would have preferred pie.
What's happening here is called
conversational implication.
When the waiter said you can have cake or
ice cream, he was conversationally
implying that you can't have pie.
And the reason he conversationally implied
that is because if he were cooperating,
and following the conversational rules or
maxims, then he would have mentioned pie.
So you assume that since he said only
cake or ice cream,
that you can't have pie.
He, in effect, conversationally implied
that you cannot have pie.
And the way you figure that out was you
took what he said,
a little background knowledge about him
being a waiter and having certain goals,
and what happens in restaurants,
performed a little mini calculation using
the maxim of quantity,
and inferred that he must believe that you
can't have pie.
And of course, since he's a waiter, he
ought to know whether you can have
something else or not.
And therefore, you can't have pie.
But what if he had a favorite customer at
another table?
And he knew there was only one slice of
pie back there, and he didn't want you to
order it?
And he said, you can have cake or ice
cream.
I didn't mention the pie so you wouldn't
order it and his favorite customer would
get it instead of you.
Well, he still conversationally implied
that you can't have pie.
But he misled you.
He misled you because he was trying to get
the pie for somebody else.
He was not cooperating with you.
So the tricky thing about these
conversational maxims is that they work
perfectly fine when you're cooperating
with the person.
And try to give them all of the
information that they need for your common
purpose with that other person.
But if you're not cooperating, then you
can use them to mislead the other person.
And that's the double edged sword of
conversational implication.
But one of the features of conversational
implication is really important to
arguments.
And that's that you can cancel
conversational implications.
The waiter can say.
You can have cake or ice cream.
Oh yeah, and you can also have pie.
And when he said, and also you can have
pie, he did not take back, you can have
cake or ice cream because you can still have
cake or ice cream. It's just that you can
also have pie.
So he can cancel the conversational
implication that you cannot have pie by
saying, Oh yeah, and you can also have
pie.
So, with a conversational implication, if
a certain sentence P conversationally
implies another sentence Q, then you can
deny Q, and P still might be true.
And that's an important fact because it
distinguishes conversational implications
from logical entailments or logical
implications.
If I say, Alice is my sister,
Then that implies Alice is female.
And I can't go, Alice is my sister, Oh
yeah, and she's not female.
That doesn't make any sense because if she's
not female, she can't be my sister because
that's a logical implication or
entailment.
But with a conversational implication
instead, you can deny what is
conversationally implied, and the original
sentence is still true.
So if the waiter says, You can have cake
or ice cream,
And then, I find out that he's been saving
the last piece of pie for this other
table,
then I can come up to him and say, Wait a
minute, you lied to me.
He didn't really lie to me, because what
he said was still true.
I could have cake or ice cream.
It's still true, I can have cake or ice
cream.
He didn't say anything false to me.
He simply didn't mention the pie that I
could also have.
So that's very different in the case of
conversational implication than in the
case of logical entailment.
And that'll be important to us especially
when we get to formal logic in a later
part of this course.
So let me give you another example that's
more important.
Imagine a politician says, I've got a
policy that's going to reduce crime by
getting criminals off the streets.
And the policy is lock them all up.
When people are suspected of crimes, you
lock them all up.
That's going to get criminals off the
street.
Well, that might convince people, if they
don't notice that he's left out another
fact.
He's not just going to get people off the
street who are criminals, he's going to
get lots of other people off the street
too.
He didn't give you all the relevant
information, like the waiter who misled
you with the pie.
He suggested that his policy will solve
the problem of crime by putting people in
prison who would commit crimes.
And, just left out the other relevant fact
that it's going to put lots of other people
in prison too.
So he has conversationally implied that
there's no other relevant facts to
consider, by only mentioning that it's
going to reduce the crime rate.
And you have to be good at looking through
that implication and asking, Yes, but is
there something he's leaving out?
And that's often what you need to do in
order to avoid being misled by sleazy
politicians and other people who leave out
the relevant information for the issue
that you're talking about.
Now of course the politician might not
care that he misled you.
That might be the goal.
He wants to persuade you and he doesn't
care whether he misleads you, because it's
persuasion not justification that he's
interested in, as we talked about in the
first lecture.
In addition, he's got his defense ready.
He can say, but I didn't say anything
false, what I said was true.
If we put all those potential criminals in
jail, we're going to reduce the crime
rate.
Maybe it's true that we're also put some
innocent people in jail, but we will
reduce the crime rate, and that's what I
said.
And what Grice's maxim of quantity does is
it tells us exactly why we have a
criticism of him now.
We can say he's not cooperating because
he's not following the conversational
maxim of quantity, he's not giving us all
the relevant information that we need in order to
achieve our purpose if we have a common
purpose.
And this politician is pretending to have
a common purpose with us, the good of the
country, when actually he doesn't have a
common purpose with us.
He just wants to get elected.
And so Grice gives us an insight into
what's going on when we get misled in
those contexts, and also, what we need to
do to respond to those types of bad
arguments.
Now this distinction between
conversational implication and logical
entailment is crucial to arguments,
because it tells us something about how to
refute arguments.
When you don't like the premise of an
argument because it's misleading, because
it conversationally implies something
false, that's not a way to show that the
premise is false.
In order to show it's false, you have to
show that it actually logically entails
something that's false, then you can infer
that the premise itself is false.
This will become important later when we
look at the role of conversational
implication and logical entailment in
arguments.
But for now, the important thing is to
understand the distinction between
conversational implication and logical
entailment.
The speakers usually follow these
conversational maxims that Grice
enunciated when they speak and when
they're cooperating, but they don't always
follow these maxims.
Sometimes they violate them.
And of course, as always, there's a lot
more to be said about conversational acts.
If you want to learn more about
conversational acts, you should look at
the chapter in Understanding Arguments in
the text that accompanies this course.
But I think we've learned enough about
conversational acts to move on,
Because so far we've looked at language in
general.
At the linguistic level, at the speech act
level, and at the conversational act level.
Now we want to take these lessons and
apply them more specifically to the
language of argument.
That is, the particular kind of language
that gets used in arguments.
And that's what will be the topic for the
next few lectures.